Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Who Discovers and Why"

• Who Discovers and Why

  A Difficult Birth For Some Ideas

  9 November, 2018

  This fascinating article has nothing to do with drug discovery per se, but it has plenty to do with discovery itself. It’s a memoir of the author’s physicist grandfather, who believed while working at his job at Oak Ridge that he might have come across a big result in probability as related to quantum mechanics… Read More

• Drug Development

  How to Be a Good Medicinal Chemist

  22 May, 2018

  Longtime medicinal chemist Mark Murcko has a Perspective article out in J. Med. Chem. on “What Makes a Great Medicinal Chemist“. As he makes clear from the beginning, if you’ve been doing this stuff for a while, you’ve likely heard many of these recommendations before. But it’s useful for people starting out, and it… Read More

• Academia (vs. Industry)

  Decline of the Midwest?

  19 October, 2017

  Here’s an article at The Atlantic (via the Washington Monthly) that should concern anyone involved in R&D. It’s about the funding problems of many of the large public universities, particularly in the Midwest. Chemists will recognize several historically strong departments in that part of the country – but may also have noted… Read More

• General Scientific News

  Woodward 2.0

  13 April, 2017

  I really enjoyed this Curious Wavefunction post on being born at the right time. He uses the example of R. B. Woodward, who was several years older than most of the other big names from the glory days of synthetic organic chemistry (Corey, Stork, etc.), and had already had a chance to use his immense… Read More

• The Scientific Literature

  Read, And Read the Odd Stuff

  14 March, 2017

  This article gets across a truth that many people have heard as a piece of advice, but find hard to follow: read the scientific literature widely. Perhaps the bigger question is why I make the effort. The short answer is that I read widely to prepare myself for whatever might come along in the lab. Read More

• In Silico

  The Flightosome

  1 February, 2017

  I got this diagram from Arjun Raj‘s Twitter feed, and I think I enjoy it a bit more every time I see it. Some of that is because it’s a big part of what I was trying to get across in this column, but I think that the sketch does a more thorough job of… Read More

• Blog Housekeeping

  End of a Year

  20 December, 2016

  This is my last workday of the year – I’ll be posting occasionally into the new year, but some of those will be recipes (as is traditional around here). If there’s any big scientific news, though, I’ll rouse myself and talk about it. Today I’m just heading into the lab to get things wrapped up… Read More

• Business and Markets

  Out of Ideas?

  7 December, 2016

  The Wall Street Journal came out with a series of articles on innovation in the US, and the biopharma industry features quite a bit in them. The lead one is an overview, with the theme of “The US economy’s hidden problem is that we’re out of big ideas”, and there’s another one specifically on Sanofi… Read More

• Graduate School

  Getting Going

  25 July, 2016

  I’ve had a chance recently to talk to some people who are heading off to chemistry grad school in the fall, which brought back memories of when I did that a mere thirty-three years ago. A lot has changed over that time, but there are some very important things that haven’t. One of the most… Read More

• Drug Industry History

  Company Time For Your Own Ideas, Or Not?

  21 July, 2016

  Over the years, at many R&D-driven companies, there have been official/unofficial policies that researchers could spend some percent of their time pursuing their own ideas, versus their official projects and goals. You hear different figures, especially when it comes to past glories, but there are definitely companies that have made this a stat… Read More